Unauthorized Access

by Andrew McAllister

  Security for the account server was multi-faceted and well thought out. The combination of a continuously recharged set of batteries and a dedicated generator on the roof ensured uninterrupted electrical power. In a separate location, a twin of the account server computer maintained a redundant copy of the account database, so bank operations could continue in the event of a fire or other disaster. Both physical and electronic access to all the bank’s computers were severely restricted.

  These and other security measures formed a fortress to protect the electronic money from technical breakdowns and human destruction, both accidental and intentional. Unfortunately the fortress had been breached, which was why the people most responsible for creating this particular stronghold had come into the bank on a Monday evening and were gathered in the fifth floor conference room.

  Five people occupied high-backed chairs around the long walnut table. Rob sat beside Anthony Finnamore, who fit the prototypical view of a computer geek with his pear-shaped physique, thick glasses and bushy black beard. He also happened to be a gifted database administrator. Next to Finnamore was the wiry AMS system architect, Paul Dees. An avid runner, he was the ultimate authority on how the software worked.

  Stan Dysart and John Kelleher had just entered the room and now sat on the opposite side of the table from the other three. Kelleher had graying hair, large round glasses and extra pounds showing out the front of his unbuttoned suit jacket.

  “I wasn’t able to reach Tim Whitlock,” Kelleher said to Dysart, “but I left him a message.”

  “Do we need him?” Dysart asked.

  “He and Rob did the bulk of the programming for the most recent AMS upgrades.”

  “Which doesn’t answer my question.”

  “We can probably get started without him,” Kelleher said.

  Dysart nodded and turned to look at the group. His face was as stern as Rob had ever seen it. “We have an emergency, people.”

  Tim entered the room in time to hear Dysart’s words.

  “Good,” Dysart said when he saw him, “I won’t have to repeat this.”

  Rob raised a hand as Tim sat down, but Tim kept his eyes downcast and gave no indication he noticed the greeting.

  “Someone breached the security for AMS,” Dysart said. “It looks like cyberterrorists have attacked our bank.”

  Rob’s mouth fell open as he stared in disbelief at Dysart.

  “I’ll let John and Paul explain the details,” Dysart continued, “but first I want to impress upon you how imperative it is to treat this information as absolutely confidential.”

  Dysart scanned around the table, making eye contact with each person in turn. “This is need-to-know only. That’s why I asked John to call in only you key people. Not one word of this is to be discussed with anyone outside this room. Is that clear?”

  All heads nodded in agreement.

  “Good. Go ahead, John.”

  Kelleher held up a sheaf of papers. “This is a print-out of an email message I received at six o’clock this evening, along with the systems operations folks. My guess is that each of you received it as well. If you haven’t checked your email in the last couple of hours, take one of these and read it.”

  He handed a stack of papers to Rob, who kept the top copy and handed the rest on.

  To the First Malden Bank:

  We, the Financial Patriots of America, now have control of your computer systems. As a demonstration, we deleted all of today’s transactions for two customer accounts and altered the account balances as if these transactions never happened. You no longer have the data to calculate the correct balances for these accounts.

  The missing transactions are stored in new files we created on your computer. These data files are encrypted and so are useless to you without the appropriate keywords.

  To confirm this, you can restore one account to its proper status by using the DES encryption method to unscramble the file named account1.dat — the keyword is: malden

  A different keyword protects account2.dat. We suspect whoever owns this account will be quite irate when they discover you’ve lost their money!

  The First Malden Bank is just like every other bank in America. You’ve ruined our country by chasing profits at any cost. You foreclose on people who are working hard to get by, and then drive down the value of everyone else’s homes by dumping those properties on the real estate market. You demand payment with no regard for the people whose lives are crushed when hardships strike.

  Now you’re going to find out what it’s like for someone else to control YOUR money for a change.

  You will make a public announcement by noon tomorrow that the First Malden Bank is creating a special fund to protect the customers who have been affected by your own greedy policies. Once the announcement is made you will be provided with the keyword for the scrambled account data along with further instructions.

  Financial Patriots of America

  Rob laid the sheet down and blew out a shocked breath. A tumble of thoughts flew through his mind as he tried to wrap his head around the enormity of what this meant for First Malden. As far as he knew, there had never been a successful cyberattack on a bank, at least none that had gone public. But here he was thrust into the middle of one.

  He was the first to break the stony silence.

  “This is unbelievable,” he said.

  “The operations staff thought it was spam when they first received the email,” Kelleher said, “but they checked it out to be sure. They called me when the files turned out to be on the computer. Since then, Paul has been looking into it.”

  “I was able to unscramble the first file,” Dees said. “It contains a savings account number plus three transaction records that show a deposit and a withdrawal at about eight this morning, then a twenty-dollar withdrawal just after lunch time. AMS shows no transactions for this account today. By the way, the two scrambled files were created at five-thirty this afternoon.”

  “Just before the six o’clock backup,” Rob said, “so even if we went to the morning backup copy, we’re still missing almost twelve hours worth of data.”

  “Exactly,” Dees said. “Seems our friends know what they’re doing. I checked the remote copy of the database as well. The records have been scrambled there too. And if the transaction records I unscrambled are accurate, this account should contain over a thousand dollars. AMS says the balance is nineteen cents.”

  Finnamore let out a low whistle.

  “Hold it now,” Rob said. “What if AMS is right? Maybe the file is just a decoy and AMS hasn’t been touched.”

  “We thought of that,” Dees said, “but even putting a file on our system is a serious security breach. And once I had the data to restore the account, Mr. Dysart agreed to let me phone the customer. His name is Arthur Stevens. I told him we had a minor system hiccup and were phoning a few selected customers to make sure everything had been restored properly. He was suspicious at first about whether I was really with the bank, so I had him call back in. Once I convinced him who I really was, he confirmed that he withdrew twenty dollars using an ATM at one-thirty-eight this afternoon. He had the receipt in his wallet and quoted me the exact time and transaction ID number. I fixed the account manually as soon as I got off the phone. As for the second account, I don’t even know how to figure out which account has been altered, let alone how to fix it.”

  “There’s no way to decode the second file?” Dysart said.

  Dees shook his head. “There are trillions of possible values for the keyword. Even a computer would take years to try them all. Basically, someone managed to steal today’s records for these accounts. And of course if they can do it for two accounts—”

  “Then they might be able to do it to all of the accounts,” Finnamore said.

  Rob could barely believe what he was hearing. Could this really be happening? Was he about to have an insider's view as an American bank imploded?

  Dees’ somber look matched the others in th
e room.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “So who sent the emails?” Rob asked.

  “They came from a UCLA address,” Kelleher said, “someone using the id FinancialPatriots.”

  “Can we trace that,” Dysart asked, “find out who’s behind this?”

  Kelleher looked at Dees, who said, “Maybe. We’d have to contact the folks at UCLA and ask for their help.”

  “Which would mean telling them we have a problem,” Dysart said.

  Dees shrugged. “Probably, unless we can think up some other reason why they should tell us about one of their accounts. That type of information is normally confidential.”

  “We can’t admit to anyone outside this building we were vulnerable to attack,” Dysart said. “As far as the public is concerned, any issues are strictly technical.”

  “Then we’ll have to give it careful thought before we try contacting UCLA,” Kelleher said.

  “If we contact them,” Dysart said.

  Kelleher nodded in acknowledgment.

  “But how did someone hack into our systems?” Rob said. “I would have bet that was close to impossible. Did you check the security logs?”

  Dees nodded. “Of course. As far as I can tell, only the system operators have logged on to the account server in the past several weeks. But their accounts don’t have the privileges they’d need to mess with AMS. And according to the firewall logs, no one has hacked in either. I also looked to see if there was any new software on the server. I mean, they’d need some sort of program to create the encrypted files.” Dees spread his hands. “All I found was the stuff that’s supposed to be there.”

  “So you don’t know how they did it,” Kelleher said.

  “Not yet,” Dees said, “but I’ve only had time to check the obvious things so far. With a little persistence we should be able to figure out what happened.”

  “Should be isn’t good enough,” Dysart said. “This problem has to be fixed right away. Any other option is simply not acceptable.” He punctuated the last word with a jab of his finger. “Customer confidence is everything to a bank. The only reason people give us their money is because they know we won’t lose it. What do you think will happen if we have to tell our customers we have no idea how much money they have in their accounts?”

  Dysart swept the room with his gaze but this time only Rob met it. All the others were studying the wood grain of the table.

  “We’d have lineups out the door at every branch,” Dysart said. “People demanding their money. In cash. Right now. All of it, thank you. No bank can withstand that kind of run.”

  He paused to let these words sink in.

  “There will be no special fund,” Dysart continued, “or public announcements of any kind for that matter. I’m not letting a bunch of terrorists tell me what to do. Apparently you people built some jerry-rigged system that’s not good enough to keep out the unwashed hordes. Now you damn well need to fix it! I want that second account restored to its proper balance, and I want you to fill in whatever electronic hole these people crawled through so this never happens again. If you can do that, it’s possible—just possible mind you—some of you might keep your jobs. Otherwise, there probably won’t be any jobs left to keep.”

  With that, Dysart rose and stalked out of the room. Rob’s feeling of surreal disbelief ratcheted up to a whole new level as he watched Dysart go.

  Kelleher took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “Well, people,” he said, “I’d say we have some work to do.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LATE AT NIGHT in his cubicle, Tim leaned forward in his chair and hit the Page Down key occasionally while he stared at the computer monitor. He was skimming through the AMS computer programs, supposedly looking for any irregularities. He went slowly on purpose, since he knew there was nothing to find.

  The calmness of his face belied the energy that churned within. He had burned up so much nervous adrenaline that day that he felt like a wrung-out dishcloth. What a rush to watch everyone running around like mice on exercise wheels. After all the months of planning and scheming, he couldn’t believe this day had actually arrived. A big part of him was still terrified that something he hadn’t anticipated would rear up and derail everything. So far, though, everything had played out exactly as he predicted. He had to wait another twelve hours for the next step in his plan, but he didn’t mind. Tim was good at waiting. After all, he had been doing it for most of his life.

  As a young child he had waited for his parents to realize the world didn’t revolve around his older sister. His mother was forever talking on the phone with her friend Glenna about Kathleen’s track and field ribbons, and straight-A report cards, and later her oh-so-polite boyfriends.

  In high school Tim waited to work up the nerve when he wanted to ask a girl for a date. He even managed to blurt out the words a time or two, not that it did much good. He usually received a rude “No, I’m busy that night.” Or even worse, the time Karen Cunningham stared at him in silent horror and then walked away shaking her head. She spent the next week reliving the event with anyone who would listen, using “can you imagine?” as her punctuation of choice.

  Becky Farmer accepted his invitation to the Christmas dance once. The two of them stood to one side of the school gym and hardly spoke to each other the entire evening. Tim remembered feeling relieved during the times one of Becky’s friends wandered by and talked with her for a few minutes before rejoining the milling groups of Popular People. At the end of their walk home, she muttered a quick “Good night” and escaped up her front walk.

  So he waited for someone comfortable, for the chance to be himself. He waited until his junior year when the McGrath family fled the New York City rat race by moving to Worcester, Massachusetts and bringing Lesley into his life.

  Not that Tim was in her life, at least not at first. She was self-assured and pretty—gorgeous, actually—and was immediately swallowed up by the popular people. But he watched her and he could tell. She wasn’t snotty like the others. The barbs and cruel shots still jabbed out to sting him when he passed the knots of girls chatting in the corners, their school books clutched against perfect breasts he would never know. But Lesley just frowned when this happened, never joined in. And she always smiled at him when they passed in the hallway.

  Before long he was waiting for Lesley, waiting to talk to her when none of the others were around to make him all tongue-tied.

  He finally got his chance on a Saturday afternoon in his senior year. It was one of those late September days when the air had just enough bite to feel really good as you drew it in. The sun was so strong your shadow was practically etched on the ground, dark and sharp-edged so it seemed the shadow would stay there after you moved on.

  Tim’s mother drafted him into her service that afternoon at the Johnny Appleseed U-Pick. He did his best to beg off going but to no avail. She needed his long arms to pluck those hard-to-reach gems from the topmost branches, where the apples would be red all around and not half yellow like the ones further down that she felt just anyone could pick.

  She stood at the foot of the ladder and supervised the entire operation with the tenacity of a drill sergeant, pointing out this one and that, rejecting many perfectly delectable specimens after he pulled them off and showed them to her.

  Tim’s father didn’t have the patience for this foolishness. He preferred to wait by the car, Marlboro in hand, until all the agonizing decisions had been made. Then it was his job to pony up the required six dollars and fifty cents—not, of course, without grumbling that the people who owned the U-pick were probably making an outrageous profit on the transaction.

  At one point his mother had to walk back to the shed to get a different basket from the folks who owned the orchard. One of the baskets they had given her had a sharp point sticking up from inside, of all things, which was likely to poke her when she reached in for an apple and she wasn’t going to stand for it thank you ve
ry much. This left Tim at the top of the ladder with nothing to do except close his eyes and enjoy the sunshine on his face. He hadn’t noticed while his mother was harping at him but it was actually kind of pleasant. Tim shined an apple on the front of his shirt and bit off a mouthful of tart crunchiness.

  That’s when it happened.

  “Hi Tim.”

  The patterns of sunlight that made it through the leaves looked like camouflage on Lesley’s white T-shirt and jean overalls.

  “Are you picking any,” she asked, “or just working on a tan up there?”

  Tim swallowed the bite of apple. “A bit of both, I guess.”

  He scrambled down the ladder with all the agility he could muster, which didn’t feel like much.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  Her smile lit up her face. “What do you think? Same as everybody else.”

  “No, what I meant was, I didn’t expect to see anyone I know. I mean, my mother basically had to kidnap me to get me to come along. Same thing happen to you?”

  He was astounded at how easily the words spilled out.

  “Not at all,” she said. “Mom and I have gone apple picking every year since I was a kid. Kind of a tradition, I guess. Autumn comes and we just … go.”

  “That’s cool. Different from my family, but cool.”

  “And this year was easy. It used to be quite a drive to find an orchard when we lived in New York.”

  Tim watched her pony tail bob as she turned away momentarily to check her mother’s whereabouts. Man—so beautiful. This couldn’t be happening. Not only had she come over to talk to him, but he wasn’t even nervous. He knew it; she was different from the others.